Hi Tequila,

Quote Originally Posted by tequila View Post
Could one really call the "democracies" in question a genuine "blunder" when the Afghan government still retains legitimacy throughout the country and the current Iraqi government in its present form was never the intended result of U.S. policy, but rather one they were forced into by the Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, and which came about through a series of negotiations between Sistani, the U.N., as well as the U.S.?
I suppose it depends on how you define "blunder". I tend to use it in a way that is similar to "prat fall" - an embarrassing, and stupid, but not fatal action / event. US policy demanded a "democracy" of the republican form, something that caused a lot of problems in the 2003 Loya Jirga in Kabul when there was a legitimate government in exile. By forcing the royal family out of the equation (to a large degree), this served to reduce the overall legitimacy of the Karzai government, although that seems to be correcting itself over time. A parliamentary democracy under a constitutional monarchy could have been easily established with quite a large reservoir of legitimacy since it was already part of the cultural matrix.

In Iraq, things were quite different, including the sources of legitimacy. The current form may not have been the intent of US policy, but that is, really, an "I didn't know it was loaded!" type of argument. We've had a lot of discussions on what went wrong, so I'm not going to rehash them, but I will point out that in order to make any democracy, regardless of its form, work, it really does require both cultural and structural legitimacy and, if you are going to try and build that de novo, it takes quite a while.

Marc